Watch
Your Tongue
Lessons from
Rush
Chuck
Colson
March 06,
2012
Radio host Rush Limbaugh had a bad week last week.
And thanks to his imprudent, unkind, and rude outburst against a
female Georgetown University law student, so did the cause of religious
freedom.
The student, Sandra Fluke, told democratic lawmakers that
Georgetown University, a Catholic institution, did not provide insurance
coverage for contraception. This, she said, meant that Georgetown law students
would have to spend $3,000 of their own money for contraceptives over the
course of their law-school tenure.
A reasonable response to Ms. Fluke’s statement would be to ask
why a Catholic institution’s First Amendment rights should be overturned just
because Ms. Fluke and her fellow law students want free contraception.
But Mr. Limbaugh’s response was anything but reasonable.
Instead, he called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
And in so doing, he violated the rules of charity and civil
discourse — and he gave the Obama Administration and the supporters of
so-called “reproductive rights,” the ultimate political weapon: a symbol, a
sympathetic victim, a martyr for the cause.
Well, when advertisers started withdrawing or threatening to
withdraw from Limbaugh’s program, Limbaugh apologized. But the damage has been
done.
The President didn’t miss his opportunity: He called Fluke and
told her that her parents should be proud of her. The New York Timesran a
front-page article about her. And you can bet we’ll be seeing plenty of her in
the weeks and months to come.
The media, the Administration, and its allies now have the
poster-child they need to keep framing the issue as being all about curtailing
a woman’s access to contraception. As I said yesterday, that’s a red herring.
Nobody is suggesting restricting access to contraception.
The issue here is religious freedom: whether religious
institutions should be forced to violate the tenets of their faith by offering
insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and
sterilization. It will now be, I am sorry to say, an uphill climb to keep that
issue in front of the public — a public that is driven more by images like that
of a clean-cut young law student than it is by reason and constitutional issues
like religious freedom.
So folks, what do we learn from this? First, we see just how
coarsened our culture has become, the level to which public discourse has sunk
— especially among the talking heads and some politicians. Ad hominem attacks,
name-calling, outrageous statements designed to get attention . . . well, sadly
we’ve come a long way since the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Second, we Christians should remember the words of Paul in
Romans 12: We are to overcome evil with good; we are to love our enemies. So,
when we engage in debate, we must do so civilly, with winsomeness and charity,
with respect for those we are debating, as we did so carefully in the Manhattan
Declaration. If we don’t do
this, then not only do we sin against charity, we set back the cause of the
Kingdom.
As
Martin Luther King, Jr., liked to say, “Whom you would change, you must first
love.” Vital words to remember as we try to shed light in this
increasingly dark culture.
